Text analysis 1

The effects of shock advertising.
The Advertising Club.

I looked into an article written by Kiran Manral, who is a well known author and blogger, she has a very strong interest in how advertising works, how a human can be influenced to buy or invest in something they don't know anything about, just a photo or a story.

Throughout the article she doesn't necessarily seem to be biased towards any side of the story, she speaks with a very neutral tone, explaining useful information about shock advertising, and also very inter sting facts within the shock advertising world.

However at the end of the article she does give her own opinion on positives and then negatives of shock advertising.

The article was written on the 15th november 2011, right about the time where the NHS released a campaign to help stop peoples addiction to smoking. The NHS had already created multiple campaigns to help people give up in the past, however they must have felt it wasn't enough, and something else needed to be done, something different, so they created a shock advertising campaign, with grim images of people with fishing hooks going through their mouths, with the slogan 'Get Un-hooked'.

These series of advertisements where all banned from being produced, people found it disturbing, and also I guess smokers could have been offended due to the fact it seems they are being treat brutally, and smokers may be worried about the fact they are treat differently because of something they do.

Kiran goes on to explain how a lot of people use shock advertising as a way to skip boundaries in their work, they feel they can put any shocking image onto their work and aslong as it shocks the audience the job is a good one. Well it doesn't work like that, at all. If your work is to shocking to even look at people are going to block it out of their lives, and what good is that for an advertisement, it does need to obviously shock the audience, but not to a sense where they want it out their lives, it needs to shock them mentally just as much as it shocks them physically, make the audience think about what they're looking at, and the aim is to make them or someone else make a change in or to their lives.

Shock advertising is a bad approach if you are trying to sell a product, or get your company higher in the charts, shock advertisements would be much more suitable for a campaign trying to help people, or a institution that is trying to make a change in the world.

The United Colours of Bennetton

"Benetton for instance used religious taboos (a picture of a priest and nun kissing), Cultural taboos (The visual of a black woman feeding a white baby), a death row inmate's thoughts, an AIDS patient on his death bed. These images are ones that force the viewer to confront and deal with their inherent biases and prejudices and can result in negative feelings for the brand. On the flip side, the advertising has resulted in positive feedback for the brand for talking about difficult issues and taking a stand on social and environmental issues."